Where To Begin
Starting Guide Hello and welcome! The Wasteland is an alternate universe roleplaying game set in the same world as the Mad Max movies: a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world where the end-game is simply survival. The game was created to provide players an opportunity to create their own adventures while immersed in the world of cooperative writing. Visit our roleplay subreddit to read the current story. If you decide that you're interested, character application begins on the community subreddit! Feel free to come by our IRC chat to meet your fellow Wastelanders or to ask any questions. Important Information Chronology The Wasteland is set after the events of Imperator Furiosa's road war, which for our intents and purposes, occurs after the events in Beyond Thunderdome--which is pure speculation on our part as even George Miller hasn’t stated when it occurs with 100% certainty. Taking the chronology found here into consideration--granted, it’s not an official chronology because such a thing doesn’t exist, but it suits us just fine--it’s still difficult to set an exact year to the game. This is what we’ve come up with instead: * Characters aged 60+: The Wise Ones - have the Knowing of the world in the Before-Times. These are the only people who were still alive as young adults before everything as we know it came to a grinding halt. They may have fought in the Final Wars. * Characters aged 27-59: The Children of the End Times - these are the portion of the current population who were children at the time of the Great Collapse. They will only have faint recollections of the Before-Times, but will recall in far greater detail a time of shortages, the collapse of government and law enforcement, breakdown of long-distance communication, an exponential increase in crime rates with the rise of outlaw gangs, and the true dangers of long-distance travel as attacks on supply trains become more and more prevalent. * Characters aged 1-26: Those Born after the End - the current world is the only one they have ever known. The Setting The Wastelands, otherwise known as the Wasted Lands to those that live within them, were once known as the Australian Outback, or the wilds. Following the world collapse, more and more people began abandoning the cities along the coast and moving further inland. When the nukes fell, they hit the most populated areas, leaving the once-proud metropolises shell-shocked and too full of radiation for anything to thrive within them. These people banded together in factions or tribes in attempts to cling to their culture, building small colonies or becoming part of larger ones. Warlords rose to power with the support of their warrior gangs, claiming control of the largest settlements and the resources they offered. But they soon realized that no one man or woman had it all. No one out there in the wasted lands had everything they needed to survive. And so it was that an uneasy peace was made between the Citadel with their green stuff, the Reservoir with their uncontaminated water supplies, the Bullet Farm with their armories, and Gas Town, who had control of all of the guzzolene, for the sake of supplies; for the sake of trade. Bartertown offered a mid-point between them all, a hub for commerce as well as a place to find entertainment and company in an otherwise barren world. Please consult this map for a visual picture of where places are generally located in the Wasteland. Government There is no one world order. Government, in the loosest of senses, exists in some places at the colony level over the settlement as a whole, while in others it is based purely upon the tribe’s organization--if it is organized at all. At the head of each of the five largest settlements exists an NPC overlord/warlord/chieftan. They maintain control of the primary resource produced within that settlement with the support of the faction that they head. The rest of the population may be divided into smaller factions or tribes led by others, but in order to remain within the protection that the larger settlement provides, they must adhere to the policies/laws created by those that rule the settlement. Refugees, meanwhile, exist as unorganized forces in every one of the settlements and are used primarily as laborers if they are of use at all. This is left in broad terms to allow players the freedom to world-build; to create those tribes and smaller factions that may either exist within the larger settlements or survive out in the waste on their own as scavengers or the like. The Factions and Clans sheet offers specifics with regard to which people occupy which settlements or areas, who their leader is, how many are in the tribe, as well as what resources they are in control of if any. Currency No longer is a man’s worth measured by how much money he has. The real currency in the Wastelands is trade--either in terms of what items you’ve managed to collect, steal, barter for, etc., and physically have to offer in trade, what knowledge you may have that others do not, what skills you possess, or what resources you manage to control. Climate The Outback has always been arid, but thanks to climate changes followed a short nuclear winter, the Wasted Lands currently experience very erratic changes in weather patterns. The ozone layer has been greatly depleted, and as such, UV rays are more harmful than ever. At night the temperatures drop with the sun, and during the day, they skyrocket again. Good clothing is essential in order to afford some protection from exposure the sun’s radiation. Windstorms tend to be very violent if/when they do occur, with cyclones that tear through ramshackle settlements with ease, carting off and or destroying necessities. These winds tend to kick up or bring in radioactive dust from the cities; goggles and masks or handkerchiefs to cover mouths and noses in an effort to filter out the harmful particles are important. Black rainstorms occur infrequently and are just as unpredictable as any other kind of weather to be found in the Wastelands. They are so named due to the colour of the precipitation, which contains toxic particles that tend to burn and sting when they come into contact with people or animals.